University of Baltimore Law ScholarWorks@University of Baltimore School of Law All Faculty Scholarship Faculty Scholarship Fall 2009 Operatively White: Exploring the Significance of Race and Class through the Paradox of Black Middle-Classness Audrey McFarlane University of Baltimore School of Law, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: http://scholarworks.law.ubalt.edu/all_fac Part of the Civil Rights and Discrimination Commons, and the State and Local Government Law Commons Recommended Citation Operatively White: Exploring the Significance of Race and Class through the Paradox of Black Middle-Classness, 72 Law & Contemp. Probs. 163 (2009) This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Faculty Scholarship at ScholarWorks@University of Baltimore School of Law. It has been accepted for inclusion in All Faculty Scholarship by an authorized administrator of ScholarWorks@University of Baltimore School of Law. For more information, please contact [email protected]. OPERATIVELY WHITE?: EXPLORING THE SIGNIFICANCE OF RACE AND CLASS THROUGH THE PARADOX OF BLACK MIDDLE-CLASSNESS AUDREY G. McFARLANE* "Analytically race and class are theoretically distinct. Realistically in the US they are indistinguishable."! "[R]ace is ... the modality in which class is lived .... ,,2 I INTRODUCTION No current discussion of race in the United States is complete without acknowledging the interaction of race and class. Both are overlapping categories of identity that lead to significant, yet often unacknowledged, differences in material conditions and life opportunities. But neither category, standing on its own, adequately reflects or explains reality.3 Examining these categories in tandem reveals that race and class represent interconnected yet competing constructs with consequences for the prospects of addressing racial segregation and subordination. In particular, society's unexamined embrace of class discrimination reflects the irony that class is both the preferred method for and the hidden obstacle to racial justice. Copyright © 2009 by Audrey G. McFarlane. This article is also available at http://www.law.duke.edu/journals/lcp. * Professor of Law, University of Baltimore School of Law. Thanks to Michele Alexandre, lanai Nelson, Gilda Daniels, Odeana Neal, Cassandra Havard, Terry Smith, Patience Crowder, and last but certainly not least, Paulette Caldwell, for comments on earlier drafts of this article and conversations about the ideas it presented. The University of Baltimore Summer Research Grant provided helpful support in developing this article. 1. Howard Winant, Remarks at the University of California Irvine Race and Law Workshop (May 2, 2008). 2. Stuart Hall, Race, Articulation, and Societies Structured in Dominance, in BLACK BRITISH CULTURAL STUDIES: A READER 16, 55 (Houston A. Baker, Manthia Diawara & Ruth H. Lindeborg eds., 1996). 3. See Ian F. Haney Lopez, The Social Construction of Race: Some Observations on Illusion, Fabrication, and Choice, 29 HARV. c.R.-c.L. L. REV. 1, 27 (1994) ("[T]here is no natural congruence between class and racial interests. At different times, class allegiances may follow or cut across race lines, and vice versa."); john a. powell, The Race And Class Nexus: An Intersectional Perspective, 25 LAW & INEQ. 355, 358 (2007) ("[R]acial practices in the United States help define the meaning and development of our understanding, and the practices of class."); see also DERRICK BELL, SILENT COVENANTS: BROWN V. BOARD OF EDUCATION AND THE UNFULFILLED HOPES FOR RACIAL REFORM 79-80, 182 (2004) (discussing the "property" right of Whiteness, which benefits even poor Whites, compared with the persistent racial disadvantage for even highly educated BlackS). 164 LAW AND CONTEMPORARY PROBLEMS [Vol. 72:163 Taking race and class into account often means acknowledging that Black racial identity combined with poverty leads to enhanced, sometimes nearly totalizing, disadvantages. The combination leads to limited life options, a degraded or shortened life expectancy, and limits on agency: the ability to make choices in one's own life. Because the black identity is equated with poverty, little attention has been paid to the significance for racial-subordination analysis of the increasing numbers of Blacks stepping into middle-class roles formerly held almost exclusively by Whites. In land use and development, the racialized landscape has been created by racism and deliberate segregation of Blacks in black communities and Whites in white communities. As affluent Blacks become suburbanites and inner-city gentrifiers, they move into positions, privileges, and opportunities shaped by this racialized landscape. Ironically, their presence may play an inadvertent role in furthering economic discrimination that disproportionately disadvantages poor Blacks. The movement of affluent Blacks through the racialized landscape raises questions for anti-subordination analysis: what happens to subordination when the Black identity is combined with comparative affluence and educational attainment? What effect does class have on race in this circumstance? If we treat the question literally and think of race as a phenotypical matter of heritage and color, the answer is obvious; class does not change phenotype.4 Conversely, if race is thought of as a context-specific set of structural advantages and disadvantages and the extent to which race and class performance is part of "doing race and class," the answer is more complex. It is worth ruminating about that this more complex view of race and class comprehends racial stigma as well as class advantage and disadvantage. Consider the example of gentrification and the concern about its exclusion of the poor through displacement. When Whites are gentrifiers, for example, the disproportionate racial impact imposed by gentrification on lower-income Blacks is visually apparent and suggests that something involving racial subordination is taking place. But because of the role of market forces in creating hot real estate markets, gentrification is viewed as being about class, not about race. The racial lens on gentrification is weakened further by the presence of affluent Blacks in the influx of gentrifiers. Their presence suggests that Blacks are welcome if they have the money, thus indicating that gentrification sounds in class, not race. But changing the race of the gentrifier does not necessarily change the racial nature of the problem. The complexity 4. For a discussion of the different advantages and disadvantages conferred by color, see Taunya Lovell Banks, Colorism: A Darker Shade of Pale, 47 UCLA L. REV. 1705 (2000); Leonard M. Baynes, If It's Not Just Black and White Anymore, Why Does Darkness Cast a Longer Discriminatory Shadow than Lightness? An Investigation and Analysis of the Color Hierarchy, 75 DENV. U. L. REV. 131 (1997); Trina Jones, Shades of Brown: The Law of Skin Color, 49 DUKE L.J. 1487 (2000); see also Arthur H. Goldsmith, Darrick Hamilton, & William Darity, Jr., From Dark to Light: Skin Color and Wages Among African-Americans, 12 J. HUMAN RESOURCES 701 (2007) (demonstrating through empirical study that light-skinned blacks who are educated and affluent have income and educational attainment measures indistinguishable from Whites). Fall 2009] OPERA TlVELY WHITE? 165 for understanding racial subordination lies in the reality of the mechanics of displacement and exclusion: at different decisionmaking junctures, affluent Blacks sometimes demonstrate that they have similar incentives to Whites-to avoid, run away from, or oppose projects or endeavors that would benefit lower-income Blacks. Taking race and class into account seems to demand exploration of the significance of Blackness and affluence within an existing societal structure that has evolved from white supremacy to a seemingly less-virulent, or more-benign, white norm-one in which normalcy, wealth, advantage, and presumptions of innocence are still implicitly predicated on Whiteness and in which an economic structure of white privilege and advantage is inscribed into the geography of the physical landscape. Similarly, the vestigial oppression of slavery has evolved to a norm of presuming black deviance, lack of wealth, disadvantage, and presumptions of guilt; and an economic structure whenever Blackness is inscribed on the physical landscape to mean places that are less desirable and to be avoided. Using the example of the black middle class, it is possible to see that the vestigial oppression of slavery and the domination of white supremacy have morphed but have not been eliminated.5 Instead, those institutions have been disaggregated into discrete, wealth-based components of Blackness and Whiteness. Thus, Blacks with money are privileged in certain limited circumstances to be operatively white. Through their wallets and educational or professional attainments they gain access to some of the privileges, goods, and services formerly reserved exclusively for Whites. This access is contingent and sometimes unpredictable. For example, consider the experience of Blacks in a place as ubiquitous as the shopping mall. Upscale shopping and entertainment has been a central means of local economic development. Race and class exclusion is deliberately embedded into lUxury retail concepts replicated throughout these developments. The welcome to Blacks as mall patrons is contingent and easily dissipated.6 Blacks are welcome to the extent they can show they are Blacks with class; that is, that they have the money